


The Coolest Person In Joutenvesi

by onnenlintu



Series: Joutenveden Tytöt [1]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen, Kasvatus-verse, Other, Slice of Life, all the same ships are still going strong but the narrator just doesn't care too much, due to being nine, i'm bad at maths, or so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-28
Packaged: 2019-07-18 17:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16122908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onnenlintu/pseuds/onnenlintu
Summary: Slice-of-life Kasvatus-verse, set after the end of Puolikas Ihminen (and Með Jötnum). Viivi isn't sure what she was expecting in the first place from some "old friends" visiting, but whatever it was, it was nowhere near as good as the reality. Sigrun Eide is the most impressive person she's ever seen.





	The Coolest Person In Joutenvesi

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you didn't think the big farm ending was really an ending, because I still have plenty of slice-of-life content for that timeline coming! Not sure if it'll all get presented as one-shots, or if some of it will be collected into the same "multi-chapter" thing. Happy to take suggestions because I really don't know what would be best.

Viivi liked speaking Swedish to her dad. It felt like their special thing, even if half the people in this house also spoke it. Emil was the only person she had ever met who was properly from Sweden, so the others didn’t count the same way.  
  
“He’s not _actually_ our dad” was Janne’s only response when she told him the first part of those thoughts. Viivi told him he was being _facetious,_ pronouncing the word with all the pride of having learned it last week. He knew what she meant, and she’d heard him calling Emil “dad” more often than she ever did. Even if Janne almost always said it when he was being sarcastic, he still said it, which made her technically right - the best kind of right - when she showed him the tally-sheet.  
  
“You have met other people from Sweden, though. You met my aunt, back when we lived in Keuruu, don’t you remember?” Emil tried to describe the aunt in more detail. Viivi did not remember this at all. “She sent you mittens for your birthday, and for your eighth birthday last year too.” Oh yes, she remembered that, as well as how intense her grief had been when Onni’s pack of cats had destroyed one of them. They had been so colourful, and Reynir’s repair job hadn’t left them exactly the same. She’d gotten over it though, because she was far too mature to cry over things getting broken now.  
  
“Well, anyway, I’m really glad you enjoy speaking Swedish, because when the guests arrive they won’t speak Finnish but they will speak something like Swedish.” It felt like it had been forever since Emil had first said about The Guests. He had been so excited when he announced it that this delay felt like being awfully cheated. The snow had been barely done melting then, and now summer was almost over already.  
  
“How long till they get here?”  
  
“Two more weeks.”  
  
“That’s ages.”  
  
“It was four months when I first said, so not really. Do you want some of this bread?”  
  
Viivi thought about what kinds of things generally took “two weeks”. If you asked Lalli, he would have told you how much you could expect the moon to change in that time, which didn’t seem relevant here at all. “Two weeks” had once been how long it had taken Onni to discover it, when she’d used a nook in the toolshed to hide an experiment, trying to work out exactly how vile a dead mouse got if you watered it regularly. It was always how long you had to wait to find out if someone had the Rash. It was also how long everyone claimed Emil took to do his hair, although that was a joke. It was probably a tolerable amount of time to wait and find out why Emil was so excited about The Guests.  
  
As the time of their arrival got nearer and nearer, Viivi got more and more impatient. She knew it was her and Janne’s job to keep Tuuri out of the way while they moved everything around for sleeping places, and to stay out of the way themselves, and help scrub enough of the nice new potatoes for a big dinner the night they arrived. They had to stick to that, and do nothing else. It was just so hard to stop asking if they were here yet, when Emil and Reynir were both barely acting mature about the last few days of wait themselves.  
  
When it finally happened, Viivi could barely contain her crushing disappointment at the fact the big man they all met at the dock didn’t actually speak Swedish at all.  
  
“It’s _like_ Swedish, that’s what I meant, I’m sorry. If you listen hard, it’ll start to make sense, I promise.” Emil’s face had fallen at Viivi reacting to his friend with such obvious apprehension. “Mikkel can speak slowly for you. And Sigrun will be easier! Sigrun this is my - this is Viivi, she’s been really excited to meet you!”  
  
Overcoming her slight fear of the tall woman’s strange dialect, Viivi shook the hand that was extended to her, and found to her relief that she did understand something.  
  
“Strong handshake! This one’s a warrior!” It took Viivi a second to be totally sure what she’d heard, but when she worked it out she puffed up with pride. She stood and observed, trying to work out if there was some specific trick to the understanding, while Sigrun greeted Emil properly. Her greeting was very hands-on, in sort of the same way the pack of brothers over in the next farm were with each other, although Viivi also thought it looked a bit like someone happily buying a sheep when Sigrun took Emil by the shoulders and proclaimed "Agh! _Look_ at you!". She expressed great surprise that Emil’s hair was well past his shoulders and his lower face “properly covered” by the scruff. “And damn, that’s a cool scar, a real nice one! Good job!” It took way too long, but Sigrun did finally slap Emil on the shoulder as if to settle him back into himself, and as soon as that was over she started to tell everyone about her and her friend’s journey. The story took a lot of detours into tales of her usual life. By the time they’d all made it back to the house, Viivi had already decided Sigrun was the most exciting and interesting person she’d ever met.  
  
By day three, Viivi began to question how on earth Sigrun had come to know someone as boring as Emil. Emil made you sit still while he braided your hair, and insisted on regularly spaced mealtimes in which you ate sensible food, and Viivi was sure he was even somehow making their fire-lighting times more sensible when she wasn’t looking. Sigrun seemed to do nothing but hunt down trolls and giants, every day of her life, and would tell you about it as well.  
  
“You mean Emil hasn't told you about how he used to fight giants with me?” Sigrun acted so genuinely surprised.  
  
“He wouldn’t.” Viivi was absolutely sure that Sigrun was trying to build Emil up, which was nice of her, but Viivi wasn’t tiny and gullible like Tuuri anymore. She could tell an implausible lie when she heard it. Yes, she knew Emil went to the edge of the unclean woods every year to lead the burnoff, and she knew there were trolls there, sometimes. She also knew, though, that getting near them and fighting was the absolute last resort. Emil had told her so enough times that she could have repeated his phrasing in her sleep.  
  
“There's no _would_ , he _did_!” Sigrun was making a real attempt here. Viivi jumped when her _come on, really?_ expression made Mikkel laugh so hard the table shook.  
  
Janne believed it more than Viivi did, citing the time Emil had gone to Russia and returned with his face all messed up. Viivi didn’t precisely recall that, and was sure that if it had really been that interesting, Emil would tell her about it much more. She knew there was a big story of him fetching Lalli from danger, but mostly chose to tune that one out, because the way the telling turned into cuddling up to Lalli to croon “and I’d walk ten times that distance to fetch you again!” was beyond gross. Even Lalli told him so.  
  
Anyway, when Sigrun wasn’t trying to convince Viivi that her dad was cool, she was the best thing that had ever happened. Not only did she give Viivi the job of translating when she wanted to ask Onni about the woodworking tools, it turned out the reason she wanted them was to make a bow, so she could teach Viivi to use it.  
  
“This isn’t very powerful. I’m not a real bow-maker. But it’s a start.” The weapon Viivi had been handed was almost as tall as her, and she struggled to draw it back. Trying to summon enough power and aim at the same time was beyond frustrating. Sigrun seemed so believable, though, when she demonstrated again and gave her clear-voiced word that enough practise would make Viivi just as good. The little target they’d made was already nearly hollow in the middle from where Sigrun had hit it over and over, and such a promise was very motivating. Viivi did eventually manage to pull the bow back far enough to make the arrow really fly, but unfortunately the results were not good.  
  
“Oop, that looks like Onni’s window.” Sigrun seemed totally unfazed by the damage she’d caused.  
  
When Onni poked his head through the now glass-devoid frame to look around for the cause, his swearing was loud enough to carry all the way over, which was extremely worrying. To Viivi's great relief, when everyone came outside to see what had caused the damage, Sigrun was quick to claim it was “pretty much her fault”. Emil just looked between Sigrun and Viivi, obviously seeing the bow still in her hand, and got an expression on his face Viivi couldn’t quite interpret.  
  
“I should have known you’d be this kind of influence on them.” It was kind of a weird reaction, Viivi thought, for Sigrun and Emil to hug over this. The important part, though, was that nobody got mad about having to fix the window. Reynir let Viivi help him untangle some yarn while they watched Onni and Mikkel attempt some repairs, which didn’t feel like properly making up for it, but was something.  
  
“Can Sigrun stay forever?” Viivi waited a whole two weeks to ask Emil about it, because being patient when you asked for things did sometimes make them more likely to happen.  
  
“She has an important job back home, so no.” Emil finished braiding back her hair and started tying one of the elaborate bows he used for the ribbon on the end.  
  
“Reynir thought he wasn’t going to stay here forever, but he did.” Reynir was pretty cool. He had immediately been the best at riding it when the neighbours had gotten their horse, a real Icelandic one that helped with the winter logging, so confident he had even managed to get always-worried Onni on it behind him. He still wasn’t as cool as Sigrun, though, and it felt unfair that the visitor to stay forever would be him and not her.  
  
“Reynir is good with the sheep. And he had a special reason to stay.”  
  
“Can’t we _find_ her a special reason?”  
  
“It doesn’t quite work that way.”  
  
Viivi huffed and waited for the ribbon-tying to be done. While usually it was very nice, today it was horribly tedious waiting for Emil to finish doing her hair. She had things to do, most of them involving improvised weapons and following Sigrun around.  
  
Two weeks had felt like so long when they were waiting for the guests, yet somehow a whole month of them being here went by faster than a single afternoon of a normal day. On the last day, Viivi ran around the edges of every field, filling a grass stalk as long as her arm with the few blueberries and even fewer wild strawberries that remained in all the secret spots she knew. It was the only gift she could give in return for all the stories she’d heard.  
  
“Will you come back?” Viivi pressed the stalk into Sigrun’s hand before her boat departed, hoping desperately that the answer was yes.  
  
“Not any time soon, it’s a long way, you know. Hey, though, maybe you can convince everyone to come visit Norway.”  
  
Viivi chewed her lip. The idea of visiting _Norway_ \- where there were mountains, apparently, and people like Sigrun existed - had been dancing around her brain ever since she’d become truly aware of the concept of the place. “Could I learn to hunt trolls there?”  
  
“Oh, there’s always trolls to hunt!” Sigrun coming out with that made Emil start.  
  
“Not _soon_ though.” He stammered as he got the next sentence out, clearly making the new rule up on the fly. “No going to Norway to hunt trolls till you’re uh - seventeen, at least.” He was almost as bad as Onni, sometimes.  
  
“I’d say fifteen, fourteen if she trains hard. She’s getting better with that bow fast.” Sigrun, as usual, had much more fun ideas.  
  
“Sixteen.” Emil crossed his arms, definitely not ready to be bargained down any further. “If you still want to go when you’re sixteen, Viivi, I won’t stop you then.”  
  
_Sixteen_ felt like it would take forever to reach. Tatu from the neighbours was sixteen, and he was both as tall as Lalli and ready to treat Viivi like a nuisance for being so much smaller than him. She couldn’t even picture herself clearly at such a great age, but well, Sigrun had said she would need a lot of practise to become a real sharpshooter. She hadn't even got to try Lalli's gun out that much yet. Maybe having practically forever to train had a silver lining.


End file.
